To reward your patience while we put together the best guide to travel rewards in Canada, and to convince you that you’re going to get lots more great tricks when you sign up for our free travel rewards newsletter, here’s a quick look at a great way to save on hotels.
It’s for those who want to get free travel… but want it to be extremely simple. Simple rewards of 10% back on all your hotel stays!
Overview of the Hotels.com Rewards program
Here are the basics:
- Book a hotel on Hotels.com*
- Regardless of the hotel chain or anything else
- Gives you 10% back, always
- In the form of one stamp per night paid
- Get a free hotel night as soon as you’ve done 10 nights (10 stamps)
- Of the average value of your 10 paid nights (10% of each)
*Click directly on our Hotels.com link (and any of our links) or save it in your bookmarks instead of going directly to their site — it allows you to support Flytrippers at absolutely no cost to you!
You get 1 night free for every 10 nights you stay.
No matter which hotel you stay in, you’ll always get 1 free night that you can use at any hotel. No need to worry about hotel chains, rewards programs, points… you stay 10 nights, you get 1 free. Super simple.
The value of your free night will be the average price of your 10 paid nights, so a fixed 10% return. No complications. It’s what we call a rewards program of the more simple type (but obviously less lucrative and less valuable too).
It’s not as lucrative as a program like Marriott, where you get rewards in the form of points that can give you a free night much faster than in 10 nights.
And Hotels.com doesn’t give a welcome bonus that gives you 11 free nights in certain destinations just by getting the Marriott Bonvoy American Express Card.
But it’s simple. Very simple.
Marriott points are a bit more complicated, because there are good uses and bad uses (a very simple concept but one that many have a hard time understanding; that’s normal when you just don’t know).
Maximizing the value of Marriott points depends on the destination and the cash price. And those points can obviously only be used at Marriott hotels, so only 8700 specific hotels.
You should still get the 71,000 points from the increased welcome bonus on the Marriott Bonvoy Amex Card of course, it’s THE only card we recommend for all without exceptions.
But for all your other non-Marriott stays, or even after you’ve used the welcome bonus if you want more simplicity instead of more value (but never close that specific card), the Hotels.com Rewards program is perfect.
It’s great if you don’t travel that often or don’t want to rack your brain. But even for pros who, like me, often choose the cheapest hotels or hostels when Marriott point uses (or cash prices to earn Marriott points) don’t make sense at a particular location.
Warning: the Hotels.com Rewards program will soon be reduced from 10% to 2% back! We’ve been telling you for 5+ years what a great deal this is, and now you can see how right we were to tell you it’s good: it’s so good that they’re going to divide the rewards by 5! So make the most of it and make up for lost time before the change!
My concrete example of how Hotels.com Rewards works
For my example of a free night with Hotels.com, I was entitled to a free night of $37.96 because I had spent $379.60 on my 10 paid nights: 10% return. Simple. It’s fixed, it’s always 10%.
I had booked 6 pretty expensive hostels because it was in an expensive country (USA) as well as 4 hotels in Southern Africa where affordable options aren’t as affordable as elsewhere.
All my stays with my girlfriend (so at the more expensive hotels because she’s pickier than me haha) were with Marriott during that period and paid for with points. So the value of my free Hotels.com free night stayed low, as I didn’t have a more expensive hotel to bring up the average.
If I had paid my previous 10 nights $100 per night on average, my free night would have been $100. Very simple: 10%.
For example, for my previous free night (used in a 5-star hotel in Tangier, Morocco, where there was no Marriott hotel), I had a few more expensive hotels in the 10 paid nights so that gave me a bit higher return, $85.14 (10% of 851.40)
If you spend more per night (or less), it doesn’t matter: you always get 10% back with the Hotels.com rewards program.
It’s obviously less lucrative than hotel chain rewards programs directly in most cases, because they very often give more than 10%.
But it’s infinitely more simple.
Warning
Make sure, however, that the price on Hotels.com is as low as the other options on Trivago, which is often (but not always) the case.
In fact, the price can even be 10% higher and you’ll still get your money’s worth with Hotels.com compared to the other options on Trivago.
We love and recommend this tool because the most basic thing in the world of travel is to always compare everything. Not just compare hotels to hotels (and airlines to airlines), like many people sadly do. Compare booking sites too! They often have different prices. Trivago for hotels and Skyscanner for flights. Doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.
Personally, I concentrate my stays with Marriott as much as possible, since I’m a Marriott Titanium Elite member. I travel enough that I can earn points directly at a few other major chains, such as Hilton mostly.
But whenever I book outside the major chains, I always go through Hotels.com to add to my stash of free nights. Unless the hotel in question is at least 10% cheaper on another booking site! Just always do the math and compare.
Anyway, we’ll have a detailed guide to this very simple Hotels.com rewards program for those who sign up for our separate newsletter on travel rewards, so join now, it’s free!
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Featured image: My hotel in the Kingdom of Lesotho (photo credit: Andrew D’Amours/Flytrippers)